The Tobin Project | On April 26th and 27th, the Tobin Project hosted a Conference on Inequality and Decision Making, convening forty-seven scholars of psychology, sociology, economics, and other fields to investigate the impacts of high and/or rising economic inequality on individuals’ behavior.

Harvard faculty members Ryan D. Enos (Government), Christopher Jencks (Harvard Kennedy School), Mario Luis Small (Sociology), and Michael Norton (Harvard Business School) opened the conference with a panel on how people become aware of high and rising economic inequality. Other panels featured Zoe B. Cullen (Harvard Business School) and Beth Truesdale, PhD'17, now a Sloan Postdoctoral Fellow with the Center for Population and Development Studies at Harvard. Jason Furman (Harvard Kennedy School and Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, 2013-2017) gave the keynote address. 

PhD Scholars Kiera Hudson, Shom Mazumder, Preeya Mbekeani, and Nozomi Nakajima were selected to join the conference as well. 

David A. Moss (Harvard Business School and Founder of The Tobin Project) and Michael Norton served on the conference advisory board that developed and planned the event.

Harvard Law Bulletin | Profile of Crystal Yang PhD 2013, a professor at Harvard Law School who brings an empirical focus to the study of criminal law. She has now turned her attention to the extensive use of cash bail and pretrial detention in the U.S., in order to understand their short- and long-term consequences.

Harvard Gazette | Harvard and the University of Michigan have formed two partnerships designed to encourage economic opportunity in Detroit and to fight the national scourge of opioid addiction. 

The Detroit-focused partnership pairs the Equality of Opportunity Project — led by Harvard’s William A. Ackman Professor of Public Economics Raj Chetty, Harvard economics Professor Nathaniel Hendren, and Brown University Associate Professor John Friedman — with the University of Michigan’s Poverty Solutions initiative, the city of Detroit, and community partners. It seeks to create interventions that can improve the livelihoods of low-income Detroit residents.

Harvard Kennedy School | Harvard Kennedy School has received a $2.5 million gift from the James M. and Cathleen D. Stone Foundation to support new and ongoing work to address wealth concentration and the broader problems of inequality. The gift supports the research and outreach efforts at the Multidisciplinary Program in Inequality and Social Policy at the Kennedy School’s Malcolm Wiener Center for Social Policy, which serves as a nexus for work on inequality across the university. The program brings together Harvard faculty and PhD students from the social sciences who are exploring issues such as income inequality and wealth concentration, poverty and justice, opportunity and intergenerational mobility, and inequalities of race and place. Read more »